She was a good woman — a brave, loving, extraordinary woman — whom a single night of catastrophe had dropped through the floor of the world, and who had then spent twenty years being looked at by people exactly like me, and looked through, and dismissed with exactly the words I used to use.

Every homeless person I had ever mentally sorted into deserving or undeserving was somebody’s mother, or son, or the love of somebody’s life.

Every one of them had a locket somewhere, or should have, a person who would have wept to find them.

I had believed that a wide gulf separated people like me from people like them — that they were a different kind of person, that their fate could not be mine.

And my mother proved, with her own ruined and recovered life, that there is no such gulf.